Set of gaming pieces

Anglo-Saxon, late 6th century AD
From the princely burial at Taplow, Buckinghamshire

The Anglo-Saxons were avid games players and gaming counters,
dice and playing pieces of bone are found in many men’s graves.
This set of gaming pieces was found at the feet of the dead man in
the princely burial at Taplow, close to the pair of drinking-horns
also in the British Museum. Their regular spacing when discovered
suggests that they may have been laid out on a board or possibly
buried in their carrying box.

The actual content of board games in early Anglo-Saxon England
is difficult to identify, but various games of skill are known from
graves in Continental Europe. A Germanic burial dating from AD 300
found in the cemetery at Leuna, Saxony, contained a set of black
and white counters and a double-sided wooden board. This was marked
out for two games, tablula, a form of backgammon and
latrunculi (soldiers) a game of matched forces, the aim
being to capture the opponent’s men. Both could have been among the
games brought into Britain during the Germanic migrations.

The gaming pieces were made from tubes of bone capped at either
end by bone discs held in position by copper alloy rivets with
gilded heads. A similar gaming piece was discovered in 2013 during
excavations of an Anglo-Saxon hall at Lyminge in Kent.

J. Stevens, 'On the remains found in an Anglo-Saxon tumulus at Taplow, Buckinghamshire', Journal of the British Archa-2, 40 (1884), pp. 61-71, plates 1, 11-12